Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "In My Skin"

Kate Holden is the author of In My Skin: A Memoir of Addiction.

I asked Kate to put her book to the "page 69 test;" here is her reply:

As it happens, page 69 contains a passage that was one of the earliest I wrote, long before I thought of writing a book. It begins ‘I watched the glaze of headlights…’ and I wrote it for myself, trying to capture the most immediate images of the recollections I had of working the streets as a prostitute. It is also the passage that was chosen to feature on the back cover of the Australian edition. So I guess it is representative.

The page shows me in the midst of the grittiest part of the book, when I was hopelessly addicted to heroin, on the night I started working as a street prostitute. The language is deliberately taut and terse, but I was also attempting to pick out vivid details, to wind the reader into the situation alongside me. There is sex, there’s a little brutal candour, and there’s a very tight focus on myself as the subject and the conduit for the reader to enter this reality. It’s not a nice page, but it’s not a nice scene.

Whether it’s representative of the tone and so on… The book spans a period of five years, and several different milieux which all have their own tone, presentation, and mood. This page comes in the most disheartened and disheartening stage, when things were desperate: earlier, there are more lyrical chapters about life as a boho student, and later, there are dialogue-less passages about life on the streets, where speech seems barely relevant as I, as the protagonist, am entirely sucked, mute, into a lonely and brutal reality. The book changes tone again about halfway through, and the latter chapters are more open-feeling, as suits the experiences described.

For a book about heroin and prostitution, I must say that I deliberately included not very much droning description of sex or drug-taking. I chose to explicitly illustrate the sex on this page, because it was such a key moment. Those looking for titillation might try a different book!

Excerpt from page 69:

I watched the glaze of headlights, the windscreens of oncoming cars: a series of trapezoids with the silhouette of a single, male driver. One pulled up in front of me; I reached over and opened the door; slid in. The smell of an unfamiliar car. A woolly-haired, middle-aged man looking at me. It was happening.

‘Hi, I’m Lucy,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘How much for a headjob?’

We pulled out into the traffic and he drove us to a side street. Winter-bare plane trees shaded us from streetlights; the air outside was foggy with cold. With the engine off, everything seemed very quiet. All around us, houses were full of family lives. The lights were golden down here.

I got out a condom from the handful Jake had given me. The man looked as nervous as I was; he abruptly lifted his hips and pulled down his pants. He was hard. I started to bend across to his lap, got caught on the seat belt. ‘Just a minute,’ I tittered. Jesus, I sound like an idiot. ‘Okay.’

Down I went. Condom on. It didn’t take long. I remembered I’d been told I was good at this. I hoped I was giving value for money. What if he bashes me? What if he…Shit, Jake told me to get the money first. I kept on tonguing; the unfamiliar smell, the sense of this man’s face above me, looking down at the back of my head, the sound of his breathing.

A gasp, a pulse in the flesh between my lips, a sharp scent; it was over.

Many thanks to Kate for the input.

Read the Prologue to In My Skin.

Célestine Vaite called In My Skin "a haunting tale without self-pity. The writing is honest, direct, flawless, and deep."

Among the praise for the memoir:

In My Skin is the work of a stunningly talented writer who both graces and surpasses her material, subverting popular assumptions about addiction and prostitution while making the extraordinary seem commonplace and the ordinary deeply alluring. The subject matter, fascinating though it is, is secondary. Such are her powers to tap into the universal while telling a cracking good tale, Kate Holden could make the story of a tongue-tied troglodyte thrilling.
--Guardian

What makes her story memorable is not her fall into darkness or her rise back into health, but her changing, self-serving, probably self-saving ways of thinking about herself as she stays in the same horrible place.
--Boston Sunday Globe

Its searing intellectual and emotional honesty and the quality of the writing easily sets In My Skin apart from most other my-substance-abuse-hell memoirs.
--Independent

Holden’s vivid narrative voice lends a gritty poetry to her tale. . . . The book’s power to shock rests in its contrasts. . . . She conjures with glittering clarity the sense of invincibility that comes with the first taste of adult life, the belief that drugs can make love and art transcendent, the conviction that you are in control. In My Skin is a compelling story of love and squalor that retains humanity and sympathy.
--Observer

Verdict—better than sex.
--Canberra Review